Fitzy and Wippa spill on their worst celebrity interviews
The Sydney radio duo revealed one particular chat with a global music star went so bad, they refused to get a photo with him.
Fitzy and Wippa's producer, Tom Ivey, recalled the pair's trainwreck interview with 'one-hit wonder' Taio Cruz, the UK singer who hit the top of the charts with his 2010 dancefloor song Dynamite.
'The one you got most upset about was Taio Cruz, and he refused to take off his sunglasses,' Ivey said on-air Thursday, adding Cruz was giving 'one word answers.'
'Then you [Ivey] introduced him as 'Tayo' and he said, 'It's Taio mate',' Wippa continued.
Fitzy added, 'At the end of the interview, he wound it up quite quickly, and his publicity guy said, 'Can you guys get a photo?' And we went, 'Nah'.'
Elsewhere on the list of their 'rude' interviews included none other than the notoriously icy Daniel Craig, who played James Bond in five films.
'Have we got the Daniel Craig audio there when Wippa interviewed him for James Bond? When he said he'd rather suck puss out of an abscess?' Fitzy asked.
'I reckon that was on a Saturday as well. On my weekend, I went to sit down with Daniel Craig and the annoying thing is, Daniel Craig thought he was James Bond in the interview,' Wippa said.
'Like, it's OK. You're an actor. You're playing a role Daniel.
'Not really a friendly guy the old Craig of Daniel, man with two first names.'
Fellow Aussie radio star Beau Ryan also opened up about his painful A-list encounters as an interviewer, revealing on-air earlier this year he was left disappointed after talking to Melissa McCarthy.
Speaking on Triple M's Beau, Tarsh & Woodsy, The Amazing Race host revealed the US actress was his worst famous interview to date, describing her as 'prickly' during their chat several years ago.
'What I found is, the higher profile the talent, the easier the interview was. And what would happen, usually when I travelled to the states, you'd fly all the way over for four-minute interviews, [so] there was a lot of pressure on it,' Ryan said.
'I would usually go after Fitzy and Wippa, and they'd give me a heads-up if anyone was a problem. And I remember years ago I was in LA interviewing Melissa McCarthy, who I'm a fan of, right? I think she's funny.
'As I'm walking in, Fitzy gave me the eyes and whispers, 'She's a problem.''
Elaborating on their brief interview, Ryan described the Bridesmaids star as 'difficult'.
'[She gave] short answers, didn't want to be there, gave me nothing,' he continued.
'You feel uncomfortable. It was disappointing.
'We see them play these funny, likeable characters and we picture them as having that persona and personality, so when they don't, we're let down.
'I've seen her [McCarthy] do some wonderful interviews, but I've seen her do a lot of trainwrecks as well.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
News.com.au
3 minutes ago
- News.com.au
Royal wedding puts King Charles to the test
COMMENT So one minute you're capital 'N' normie – a paediatric nurse working in the UK's decaying National Health Service and a single mother – and then several short months later you are in the Royal enclosure at Ascot yuking it up with King Charles and praying your fascinator stays put. Such is the story of Harriet Sperling who this week added 'royal bride' to her CV with the announcement of her engagement to Princess Anne's son Peter Phillips. However, this lovely jubbly news was not revealed via thick white paper borne aloft by a Buckingham Palace footman but was exclusively splashed all over Hello!, with Peter and Harriet duo posing for exclusive photos for the magazine like a couple of bonafide Love Islanders with a fresh sideline in waist trainers. And therein lies the rub. Just as the royal family's wedding apparatus rustily cranks into gear and a courtier Googles who has the royal warrant for bonbonerie, King Charles could be about to be sorely tested. His Majesty has six nieces and nephews who live civilian lives and have civilian bills to pay – and for whom their most bankable asset is their royal status. The exclusive right to a Windsor wedding could be worth millions, even if the groom is only 19th in line to the throne and is so far down the line of succession he needs a decent pair of field glasses to see to the front of the queue. How does the King handle this given his own son and daughter-in-law have been selling their own (much better) story for more than five years now? This very issue overshadowed Peter's first wedding to Autumn Phillips in 2008 when the couple sold exclusive access to the family celebration to Hello for £500,000 ($AUD1 million), all unbeknownst to the late Queen. On the day Her late Majesty, Prince Philip and now King Charles all turned up to what was supposedly a private affair only to later find out that four snappers from the mag and a journalist had been on hand to capture the Windsors off-duty and in the vicinity of an open bar. The end result: A glossy 59-page spread including 10 photos of the late Queen alone. However the real 'get' for Hello was the first photos of royal girlfriends Kate Middleton and Chelsy Davy bonding with their potential in-laws. One was decidedly not impressed. 'Aides let it be known that [the Queen] was deeply unhappy with the decision, while senior members of the Royal Family spoke about feeling 'betrayal',' the Daily Mail 's royal editor Rebecca English later reported. So in 2008, after Peter and Autumn's Hello fiasco, Her late Majesty imposed a ban on family members monetising events such as weddings and christenings. Except, that was under the old regime. And that was long before the King's own son took himself off to California to tell his story and to reveal family details far, far more intimate than a shot of Charles eating a vol-au-vent or something. Can or will the King maintain the late Queen's photo deal ban given what Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex's have been doing with themselves for the last five years? Compared to Netflix and Oprah, a cheery spread of photos of, say, Peter and Harriet on a matrimonial high on their wedding day seems a nearly quaint idea. (If not downright attractive. Anything that pushes the idea of a functioning, affectionate and united royal family couldn't hurt.) However, nor can he risk it looking like he is letting his siblings' children make bank off their royal family status even if they do have to financially fend for themselves. Complicating things further is the fact that Charles risks looking deeply hypocritical if suddenly came over all stern about his nieces and nephews undertaking paid media outings, – but nor can he let them unabashedly go forth and commercially exploit the accident of their birth. For Peter and sister and brother-in-law Zara and Mike Tindall and cousins Princess Beatrice, Princess Eugenie, Lady Louise Windsor and James, The Earl of Wessex, they now find themselves between a rock and tax bill: None of them do royal duties and therefore none receive any palace funding while their adjacency to the throne and royal lustre must be worth a bomb on the open market. In January 2020, the same month that the Sussexes were relocating their matching yoga mats to North America Peter controversially starred in a TV ad for a Chinese state-owned dairy, posing in front of a grand home (actually the Marquess of Bath's historic Longleat) with a replica of a royal carriage and while totally-normally clutching a large glass of milk. 'As children, we used to spend a lot of time down at the dairy. There was a herd of Jersey cattle at Windsor and we were brought up on it,' he said in the ad. 'This is what I drink'. The tagline billed him as 'British royal family member, Peter Phillips.' After facing accusations of cashing in, an insider told the Telegraph: 'He was asked to do it and he didn't really see it as being a major issue. People have done far worse … He regularly gets offers for reality shows but he doesn't see himself as a famous person.' (Well don't tell the Chinese dairy industry that.) While their cousin Prince William might be raking in more than $40 million-a-year thanks to the handiwork of a mediaeval King who set up the Duchy of Cornwall trust, Peter and Zara have to earn their own coin and both have inked deals over the years. In 2001 Zara and then boyfriend the jockey Richard Johnson sold an 'at-home' story to Hello for a £125,000 fee ($AUD256,000) and she and now husband Mike Tindall sold the photos of their first child, daughter Mia, to Hello for a reported £100,000 ($205,000). (In 2011, Zara and Mike ruled out selling their wedding photos for what would have been a reported $2 million.) In 2023, Mike Tindall starred in I'm A Celebrity, earning an estimated £150,000 ($307,000). So how will King Charles navigate things around Peter and Harriet's wedding? And who is going to foot the bill for the doves? One expense no one will have to worry about – the groom's mother buying a new frock. No one has ever done more for the mustard serge industry than Princess Anne.
ABC News
3 minutes ago
- ABC News
Noni Hazlehurst's new show The Lark gives life to a complicated person with a powerful backstory
Noni Hazlehurst instantly conveys two striking qualities: a warmth sufficient to put a fangirling reporter immediately at ease; and a sense of strength — fierceness, perhaps. As we chat in a rehearsal space in Melbourne's inner north, the Logie and ACCTA award-winner, former Play School and Better Homes and Gardens presenter, and star of A Place to Call Home, refers to herself several times as an "old woman". But she is toying with a stereotype; Hazlehurst, 71, surely knows the power she wields. In a recent performance of Mother, the one-woman play she has toured for over a decade, Hazlehurst's audience entered the theatre giggling and chatting, only to quickly become one of the quietest crowds I have ever sat among. "Noni can be very tough and she can have great depth of feeling, but she's a very empathetic person and she brings that to her roles," says Daniel Keene, the playwright behind Mother and Hazlehurst's latest show, The Lark, which opens in Melbourne next month. In both, Hazlehurst plays an older woman grappling with a rich, complicated backstory. In Mother, the woman is Christie, and she tells the story of how she came to be living with alcohol addiction and sleeping rough. Hazlehurst's performance leaves no space for lazy judgements. "It would have been easy to characterise [her] as someone entirely different who was just a raving lunatic," she says. Instead, Keene's writing "sheds light on a life that you might not give consideration to … [on] people who, for all intents and purposes, fall through the cracks of our perception". In Hazlehurst's hands, that life is impossible to dismiss. After seeing Mother, and Christie, come to life, Keene was inspired to write another play for the same crew, which includes director Matt Scholten. But a second play written for Hazlehurst carried a challenge. "It became terrifying: If I'm going to write something else, it can't be the same because that would be ridiculous," Keene says. "So I [had] to find another person, another character." The Lark is the story of working-class publican Rose, who has lived all her life in the inner-city pub her father once ran. Despite patrons coming and going, Rose is, and always has been, a loner, Hazlehurst explains. "She's an observer … She's had all the time in the world to watch these people and to get closer to some of the characters, but she hasn't." Just as Christie was let down by people who actively harmed or chose not to support her — "This poor woman, she just had no help", Hazlehurst says — Rose, too, lives in the gravitational pull of a negative force. "[Rose's] job is to serve; her life is to serve, whether it's her father or the pub or the customers — but not herself." As such, she represents the many — perhaps older women in particular — whose potential power is diminished by those around them. "We are reduced by society's expectations to play certain roles in life," Hazlehurst says. But Keene's writing and Scholten's direction "help you to see under the covers of those masks, and see what's underneath". Hazlehurst considers it a privilege to have had two plays written specifically for her to perform, and she feels a responsibility to "do justice" to them. "I don't want to get a word wrong," she says. In over 10 years of performing Mother, she believes she never has. That is extra impressive when you see Keene's script. Both The Lark and Mother look, on the page, like one long poem. "There's no punctuation. There's no stage direction … and so you have to find the rhythm. You have to find the music," Hazlehurst says. In a monologue, Keene says, "all you've got is the language". "So that language has to be compelling, it has to move, it has to have rhythm, scansion, pace; it has to have energy." If Keene's job is to keep the language energised, Hazlehurst's is to make her audience find something in the performance of that language that resonates. "[Keene] leaves it to me to find my discovery of how to do it … It suggests a great deal of trust that he's not more prescriptive." But there's another job for Hazlehurst: preventing her audience from imagining her on a colourful TV set with a rocket clock and an arched window. "What's essential to me is that people don't see Noni," she says. "All I've got is me and my experience and my feelings — I am my only tool. So there's always going to be me in [a character] because I haven't got anything else to filter it through. "But I have to create a person as believable and as multi-layered as I can, because everyone is." Stage Noise reviewer Dianna Simmonds described Hazlehurst in Mother as "grubby as a newly dug potato", which pleased the actor immensely. Hazlehurst isn't self-conscious in front of her audiences — though she once was. "It's not about me. As acting guru Larry Moss said, 'The audience doesn't come to see you. They come to see themselves' — which changed my life. And at a time when so many of us are alienated from one another, she believes the power of stories to help us relate is more important than ever. "To me, that's the power of the arts — to unite us." Hazlehurst wraps up our interview by saying she's excited to see exactly how The Lark will look and feel at the end of a month of rehearsals, explaining that Rose will evolve continuously before the show opens in September. "And I'm a very old woman," she says with a sly grin. "So get in quick, is all I can say." The Lark runs from September 3–20 at The Arts Centre, Melbourne.
The Age
an hour ago
- The Age
‘It paid in the end': The family that bankrolled AC/DC – and still owns its catalogue
This story is part of the August 9 edition of Good Weekend. See all 13 stories. It's a 50-year showbiz relationship, as enduring as any of AC/DC's timeless hits, yet the bond between the band's founding brothers, Malcolm and Angus Young and the late music impresario, Ted Albert, who helped make them famous, seems destined to remain shrouded in mystery. Ahead of AC/DC's upcoming tour of Australia in November and December – the band sold 320,000 tickets on one day alone in June – the low-key, Sydney-based Albert family refuses, albeit politely, to discuss any of the Young brothers: neither Angus, now 70, nor Malcolm, who died in 2017, aged 64, nor their older brother, George, founder of The Easybeats, who died just three weeks before him at 70. This is despite the Youngs playing an intrinsic role in the Albert family's enormous impact on the Australian entertainment industry. Ted's great-grandfather, Swiss émigré Jacques Albert, went from selling watches and harmonicas in the 19th century to owning a media empire – originally called J Albert & Son, later becoming Albert Productions – that encompassed radio and television. Ultimately, it signed some of the biggest rock and pop acts to come out of Australia, including AC/DC in June 1974. Ted died young – of a heart attack in 1990 at the age of 53 – and in 2016 his family sold Albert Productions to the German music giant BMG. Despite exiting the recording industry, though, it retained ownership of its prize jewel: AC/DC's music catalogue, which includes, of course, everything the brothers ever wrote, including mega-hits T.N.T. (1975), Highway To Hell (1979) and You Shook Me All Night Long (1980). It ranks as one of the most valuable catalogues in the world, reported to be on par with that of British super-group Pink Floyd, which sold last year for $US400 million. The band's music still regularly features in movie soundtracks and commercials, generating substantial publishing fees. 'There's no doubt the AC/DC catalogue has been the Albert family's cash-cow for the past 50 years,' says music biographer Jeff Apter, who wrote Malcolm Young: The Man Who Made AC/DC. It's the gift that keeps on giving. Loading In 2010, journalist Jane Albert – Ted's niece – touched on the enduring relationship in her book House of Hits, revealing how Ted Albert bankrolled AC/DC for almost a decade before turning a profit. 'For him, it was a long-term investment,' Angus Young told her, 'but it paid in the end.' Today, the family's focus is the Ted Albert Foundation, which funds 'positive social outcomes through the power of music'.
